Stay Sweet(10)

“Very wrong,” her dad adds.

Amelia’s phone rings. “It’s Cate. Do you mind?”

They nod, maybe even a bit gratefully, excusing her.

“Hey, Cate.” Amelia leaves the kitchen and sits on the stairs.

Cate tsks. “I was hoping you’d sound better but you don’t sound better.”

“Well, my parents just tried to cheer me up by saying I prevented Molly’s corpse from mummifying.”

“That’s . . . an interesting strategy.”

“It was. It really was.”

“How about I take a shot? What do you say? Up for it?”

“Sure.”

“Cool. So I’m going to need you to walk out your front door right now.”

Amelia flinches. “Huh?”

“Walk out your front door,” Cate repeats, a playful teasing in her voice, and then hangs up.

Amelia rises to her feet and does as she was told, a smile already lifting the corners of her mouth. Shielding herself with the curtain, she peeks out the window of her front door. Cate’s standing in her driveway along with the six other returning Meade Creamery girls—juniors Sophie and Bernadette, sophomores Mansi and Liz, and last summer’s newbies, Jen and Britnee.

At least, that’s who Amelia assumes they are. She can’t be sure because each girl is wearing a dark-colored sweatshirt with a hood pulled up to hide her hair. They stand in a whispering huddle, which breaks apart at the creaking sound of Amelia opening the door. But their buzzing energy is palpable, the way it always is at the start of the summer, when the returning girls reconnect and catch up after the school year, like bunkmates at a sleepaway camp.

“What’s everyone doing here?” Amelia asks with a laugh.

Cate lunges forward, takes Amelia’s hand, and pulls her away from the house. “Shhhhhh! You’re going to blow our cover!”

“Cover for what?”

Jen tosses Cate a sweatshirt, which Cate then hands to Amelia. “Put this on.” It’s a navy one from Truman University, turned inside out. “I’ve been thinking about what you said today. How there’s all that ice cream left in the stand. I can’t come up with one good reason why we, the last-ever Meade Creamery girls, shouldn’t be the ones to eat it.”

“Seriously?” Amelia lifts up on her toes. “But what if someone sees us?”

“What could they say? We’re still legally employees.” Cate looks at the rest of the girls, almost daring them to disagree with her, which of course no one does. “Plus, you still have your key, so it’s not like we’d be breaking—”

Amelia smacks her forehead with her hand.

“What?”

“I pushed it under the door before we left today.”

Cate laughs good-naturedly, like this was to be expected somehow from Amelia. “No big. We’ll figure it out.”

To the other girls, Amelia says, “You all sure you want to do this?” They nod back at her, excited, burdened by none of the sadness Amelia carries. Though, when Amelia thinks about it, that sadness is mostly gone now, replaced by the feeling that her heart is about to burst in the best way.

*

Amelia and Cate ride together, with Cate’s truck in the lead. The rest of the girls squeeze into two other cars belonging to Sophie and Bernadette. Amelia opens the passenger-side window and sticks her head out to watch the cars turn onto Route 68. With their headlights on, and the random celebratory beeps of their horns, they resemble something between Sand Lake’s Homecoming Parade and a funeral procession.

Cate pats Amelia’s leg. “You’re not going to cry again, are you?”

“No!” Amelia says, turning to face front. “I’m really excited!”

“Me too!” Cate’s cheeks are flushed and she speaks quickly. “So here’s what I’m thinking. I’ll get one or two of the girls to stand lookout, and the rest of us will go in and grab some ice cream. Then I thought we could drive down to the lake and eat it there. It’ll be like our end-of-summer party. A chance for us to say a proper goodbye.”

“Thank you for doing this. I can’t believe—” Amelia cuts herself off because she can believe it. That Cate would organize this whole expedition for her. This is Cate. This is exactly why she would have made a terrific Head Girl. It’s a shame Molly never noticed.





CHAPTER SIX


THE GIRLS PULL INTO THE driveway of Meade Creamery, stopping just short of the parking lot chain, then climb out of their cars.

“Whoa. Someone moved Molly’s Cadillac,” Amelia remarks. She stands on her tiptoes and tries to see if it’s parked up at the house. Only she can’t. The grass is too high. And it’s dark.

“Maybe it was towed away,” Cate says.

“By who?” Amelia asks, her trepidation slowing her.

Cate doesn’t answer. She’s already moved on. To the girls behind her, she says quickly, “Okay. I need a couple of you to get down on the ground and shine your phones underneath the door so I can see where Amelia’s key is.”

Amelia and Cate both lie on their bellies in the dirt. With the help of the cell phone lights, Amelia can see her key a few feet inside on the floor. Cate asks someone to find her a long stick, which Jen races off to do. Then, after a couple of tries with it, Cate exclaims, “Got it!”